It is commonly said that the Mayor of New York City has the 2nd toughest job in America, ranking behind only the President of the United States. It isn’t hard to see why: New York is one of the most diverse and complicated places in the entire world, with more than 8 million residents, 800 different spoken languages, thousands of different economic interests representing trillions of dollars, and all of it is crammed into an area less than half the size of the Hawaiian island of Oahu. With so much going on in such a confined area, chaos is bound to result, and trying to bring order to that chaos is a task that appears both impossible and thankless: no one is ever happy with the Mayor of New York, no matter who it is, or what party they belong to.
Of all the men who’ve ever held the position, (there’s been 110 of them, no woman has ever held the job), none is held in higher esteem than the man who attempted to rein in the chaos that is New York during 12 of the most challenging years of the city’s history, Fiorello La Guardia (Author’s Note: Pronounced Lah-gwar-dee-ah). La Guardia was not an imposing man to look at: short, squeaky-voiced, and wearing perpetually ill-fitting suits and garish hats. But he made up for it with sheer force of personality, as well as a seemingly inexhaustible well of energy and enthusiasm for all the things that made New York what it was.
No mayor has accomplished more in his time in office than La Guardia did, almost single handedly transforming it into the modern metropolis that it is today, and every mayor that has come after him has been compared (unfavorably) to him. That doesn’t mean anybody is fitting him out for sainthood, however: La Guardia had a temper that was described as “volcanic,” and when he erupted, he burned everyone in his path. He had little patience for people who couldn’t keep up with him, or who appeared not to care as much as he did (which was pretty much everybody), and he made enemies everywhere he went because of an almost pathological inability to keep from running his mouth.
That being said, it is hard to argue that any mayor, of any city in America, has had a bigger impact, not only on the people who lived there, but on American history itself. After all, had things turned out a little differently, Fiorello La Guardia could have ended up one of the most powerful men in the world.
Man of the West and of the World
Fiorello Raffaele Enrico La Guardia was born in December 1882 in New York City, but he did not spend his childhood there. His father Achille, an immigrant from Italy, was determined for his family to be as “American” as possible, soon Anglicizing his son’s middle name to Henry and insisted that English be the only language spoken in the household. When Fiorello was three years old, his father joined the US Army as a musician, and so the La Guardia kids grew up in one dusty Western outpost after another. Growing up, Fiorello was teased by other children for his Italian heritage and for being short (he never grew past 5 foot 2 inches tall), and like many small boys, felt he needed to overcompensate for it by being ready to fight anyone at any time. Some historians have argued that this “little man syndrome” stayed with him for the rest of his life, and formed an integral part of his personality.
In 1898, the United States went to war with Spain, and Achille La Guardia’s regiment was sent to Tampa, Florida as part of the force being raised to attack Spanish possessions in the Caribbean, particularly Cuba. Fiorello, who was 16, attempted to enlist in the Army himself to fight alongside his father, but was turned away for being too young. He went to Florida anyway, convincing a St. Louis newspaper to send him there as a war correspondent.
However, before either La Guardia could go off to war, Achille became severely ill, likely as a result of eating contaminated rations, and was discharged from the service on medical grounds. Short of money, the La Guardias left America for Europe, moving to the city of Trieste, today a part of Italy but then controlled by the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He took a series of jobs with the US consular offices in the cities of Budapest and Fiume, but as he later admitted, he soon realized that he didn’t have much of a future in diplomacy. He was too outspoken, too brash, too insistent on doing what he considered the right thing to do to be of much use to the State Department. So he returned to America in 1907, specifically the city of his birth, and the city he would, in time, shape into his own image: New York.
Soaring High
La Guardia’s time in Europe had exposed him to a melting pot of foreign cultures, food, and languages, all of which he grew to love. He proved adept as a linguist, teaching himself Italian, Hungarian, Croatian, French, Yiddish, and German in addition to his native English. This skill served him well in his next job, as a translator at the immigration station on Ellis Island. Over the course of the next three years, La Guardia became very familiar with the seemingly unending tide of immigrants that passed through the station, most of them coming from Eastern or Southern Europe, looking for a better life or freedom from discrimination in America. He also became familiar with the often infuriating bureaucracy that came with government work.
Many of those immigrants never left New York City, which was already becoming known as one of the most diverse melting pots in the world. La Guardia was determined never to leave again either, and while working at Ellis Island, he took night classes at NYU’s Law School, being admitted to the bar in 1910. But a career as a lawyer was not his ultimate ambition: all along, he aspired to use the legal profession as a stepping stone to what he called “public service.” La Guardia hated the word “politics,” and the worst insult in his vocabulary was to call someone a “politician.” But he still strived for a career in public office, both because he considered himself a man of action and because he wanted to champion the causes of “the little guy,” the underdog, the ordinary man.
La Guardia joined the Republican Party because he identified with their Progressive wing, which fought for labor reform and against the big corporations that exploited wage workers. His personal hero was Theodore Roosevelt, the bombastic former president who was still immensely popular nationwide. However, it was tough sledding being a Republican in New York, because for decades the city had been in the iron grip of the Democratic Party political machine known as Tammany Hall. Tammany dominated city politics because they had a stranglehold on the city’s large Irish-American voting bloc, and because they weren’t afraid to engage in skullduggery in order to get what they wanted. Corruption and graft were considered almost the birthright of Tammany politicians, and for years they’d drained New York’s coffers into the pockets of themselves and their friends.
Fiorello La Guardia saw in Tammany Hall everything that was wrong with American politics, and was determined to oppose them whenever and however he could. That’s why he volunteered to stand for election in New York’s 14th Congressional District in 1914, even though it was so thoroughly dominated by Tammany that nobody else even wanted the job. He lost, but it was a much closer race than anyone had expected, and when La Guardia tried again in 1916, he won, becoming the first Italian-American ever elected to the House of Representatives.
In Congress, La Guardia was witness to one of the most momentous occasions in American history, when President Woodrow Wilson asked for a declaration of war against Germany and her allies. La Guardia voted in favor of joining the Great War on the side of the Allies, but he went further than that: he became the only member of Congress to join the Army during the war, requiring a leave of absence from his post in Washington in order to serve in uniform. La Guardia joined the Air Service as a pilot: he’d received flying lessons earlier in the decade after becoming enamored with aviation. He saw action on the Italian front against the Austrians, and for the rest of his life, though he would obtain many titles and ranks, nothing made him happier than when someone would call him by his wartime rank of “Major.”
The Loudest Man in Congress
When La Guardia returned from his war service, it was clear his political star was on the rise. In 1919, he was convinced to give up his seat in Congress to run for the office of President of the Board of Aldermen in New York City, a position that was second in power only to the mayor. Now for the first time the entire city was to be exposed to the small man with the squeaky voice and the flamboyant style. Not since Teddy Roosevelt had New Yorkers seen anything like him: La Guardia delighted in being able to make campaign speeches to Italian-Americans in Italian in the morning, then more speeches to Jewish-Americans in Yiddish in the afternoon, all the while making fiery remarks lambasting his Tammany Hall opponents as being corrupt, incompetent, and stupid. He won, and for the next two years, he battled it out with other city officials, including the Comptroller and the Mayor.
1921 was not a good year for La Guardia. Initially promised his party’s support in that year’s mayoral election, he was outraged when the Republicans picked somebody else instead. He fought for the nomination in a primary and lost, costing him his seat as aldermanic president in the process. He was forced to get surgery for an old back injury sustained in a plane crash in Italy: while he was in the hospital, thieves broke into his house in the Bronx and cleaned him out. Worst of all, his wife and baby daughter both died of illness within three days of each other, leaving the heartbroken man with no family and seemingly no political future all at the same time.
But the “Little Flower” (the English translation of Fiorello) wasn’t done yet: in 1922 he was re-elected to Congress, this time as the representative from the 20th District. La Guardia would spend the rest of the Roaring Twenties in Washington, a time when Republicans dominated national politics, largely on the strength of the economy. But La Guardia was not cut from the same mold as Republican leaders like Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover. For a long period he refused to even describe himself as a Republican, instead accepting other party labels like Socialist or Progressive. He was still a reformer at heart, and ideologically opposed to the laissez-faire, pro-business agenda that dominated the Republican Party at this time.
Whenever La Guardia took to the House floor, Congressmen and journalists alike held their breath to see what outrageous thing he was going to say next. He became famous nationwide as “the loudest man in Congress.” At the same time, La Guardia still had his eye on New York City politics: in 1929 he challenged the immensely popular mayor James J. Walker for his job. Jimmy Walker was a Tammany man, more of an entertainer than a leader, and was frequently lambasted for being both lazy and corrupt. But still, New Yorkers loved him enough to re-elect him in a landslide that year, a stinging defeat for La Guardia. Still, 1929 wasn’t all bad for him: he got married again, to his longtime secretary Marie Fisher. Because she couldn’t have children, the couple adopted a daughter, Jean, and a son, Eric.
Hizzoner the Mayor
Four years after La Guardia’s mayoral defeat in 1929, the political situation in New York had changed dramatically. The economy had come to a screeching halt and was now mired in the worst depression the country had ever known, putting millions of people out of work. Jimmy Walker had resigned in disgrace following a highly publicized corruption investigation, leaving the contest of 1933 a wide-open affair.
Fiorello La Guardia had lost his seat in Congress in the same election that had swept Franklin D. Roosevelt into the White House and was now gearing up to make another run for New York’s top job. He ran under the banner of the Fusion Party, an alliance of Republicans with New Deal Democrats opposed to Tammany Hall and independents who didn’t support either party. This coalition, spanning numerous ethnicities, economic classes, and ideologies, was enough to secure La Guardia’s election as New York’s 99th Mayor. He took office on January 1, 1934, and the city would never be the same again.
La Guardia’s first task was to resolve the financial crisis that threatened to bankrupt the city, largely caused by mismanagement and graft by previous administrations. He completely reorganized municipal administration in the city, replacing thousands of officials who’d been appointed thanks to their political connections with more qualified candidates. He pledged to appoint whoever was best suited for the job, regardless of political affiliation, spelling an end to the system of patronage that had long dominated New York government. He backed the creation of a new city charter that replaced the Board of Aldermen, long controlled by Tammany, with a new City Council that was seen as more representative. He ordered his police commissioner, Lew Valentine, to retire hundreds of “old-time” officers, many of whom were on the take, with younger, more professional replacements.
He needed the police department in order to wage a new war on organized crime in the city. La Guardia thought the Mafia dishonored the good name of Italian-Americans in New York, leading others to believe they were all gangsters. He took a particular interest in disrupting the mob’s illegal gambling operations, ordering the NYPD to conduct sweeps at businesses all over the city to seize slot machines. La Guardia, never a man to miss a good photo opportunity, then had them loaded on a barge and shipped out to Long Island Sound, where he would theatrically smash thousands of the “one-armed bandits” with a sledgehammer and toss them into the water while movie cameras rolled. On another occasion, the mayor banned the import and sale of artichokes into the city, in order to break the monopoly of a kingpin who was artificially inflating prices of the spiny vegetable that was an essential part of Italian cooking (and La Guardia would know, his spaghetti recipe was famous among his friends and acquaintances).
It seemed like La Guardia was everywhere, all the time: whenever there was a report of a fire in the city, the mayor would race to the scene with his own helmet and fire coat, sometimes personally directing firefighting operations, much to the chagrin of the fire commissioner. In order to save money in the city’s budget, La Guardia dismissed his bodyguards and instead carried a pistol around wherever he went, daring someone to take a shot at him. He was fond of making surprise visits to city departments and operations all over town, and anyone found not doing their job properly was in for a dose of the mayor’s infamous temper.
To Remake a City
Fiorello La Guardia realized better than any of his contemporaries that a city was not just a place where money was made, it is a place where people live, and he tried as hard as he could to make New York a better place to live for its inhabitants. One of the most visible accomplishments of his efforts to remake New York was his overhauling of the city’s transportation infrastructure, which was old, crumbling, and completely unsuited for the increased popularity of the automobile. For this, he partnered with his parks commissioner, Robert Moses, a man who had the exact opposite temperament as La Guardia but shared a desire to “get things done.” The two had a tempestuous relationship but still formed one of the most successful partnerships in New York history.
Multiple bridges and tunnels connecting the city with the rest of the country were built, improving car traffic flow throughout New York. Hundreds of playgrounds and swimming pools were opened, providing a place for children to play. City parks were cleaned up and refurbished, the Central Park Zoo underwent extensive renovation, hospitals and schools were built or renovated, and in Queens, a huge area in Flushing that used to be a city dump were now being prepared for the opening of the 1939 World’s Fair, which would draw millions of tourists from all over the world to New York. Right next door to the fairgrounds, the city’s first airport was being built and would be named for the former Army pilot who was chiefly responsible for its creation.
To get money for all these projects, La Guardia made regular trips to Washington to meet with the man he described as “my friend Franklin.” Fully 20% of the Civil Works Administration’s national budget was used on projects in and around New York City, largely as a result of personal appeals to the President by the mayor. Roosevelt and La Guardia were from opposing parties but were ideologically closer together than perhaps any two men in America at the time, as what La Guardia was doing in New York was what the President was trying to do all throughout the country.
However, La Guardia didn’t have Roosevelt’s marked ability to conceal his emotions. When he got angry (which was often), his temper raged unchecked on whoever was in the vicinity, whether they be a secretary or city commissioner. He had a volatile relationship with the press, who were more than happy to print every inflammatory comment he made. Many people complained of him behaving like a dictator, giving him nicknames like “Midget Mussolini” or “Little Napoleon.” La Guardia could usually shrug off these comments and move on to his next escapade, whether that be conducting the orchestra at Carnegie Hall or opening one of the first public housing projects in the country.
Soldiering On
World War II ended up dominating the latter part of La Guardia’s career in multiple ways. Had Franklin Roosevelt followed the established custom and declined to run for a third term as President in 1940, many people felt the natural successor to the New Deal platform was the Mayor of New York. However, Europe went to war in 1939, and in 1940 the Nazis swarmed into France. FDR felt compelled to run for a third term because he didn’t trust anyone else to lead the country through the storm he knew was coming, but one wonders how history might have been different if it had been La Guardia on the national ballot in 1940 instead of Roosevelt.
So, the Little Flower was convinced to run for a third term as mayor, even though he didn’t really want to: he was tired and ready for a new challenge. A month after he was re-elected, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, and so America went to war. La Guardia would lead the city through the conflict, overseeing war measures like the dimming of the city’s lights to prevent friendly ships from being spotted by U-boats (termed a “brownout”), and managing crises like the Harlem riots of 1943 and the crash of a plane into the Empire State Building in 1945. He began hosting a weekly radio show on Sunday afternoons, often for an audience as large as two million listeners. On one memorable occasion, when newspaper deliverymen were on strike, the mayor read out the comic pages over the air to entertain the kids, turning to his police commissioner to ask why his detectives were so fat compared to Dick Tracy.
By the end of 1945, with three terms behind him, La Guardia relinquished the keys of Gracie Mansion and decamped with his family to a new home in the Bronx. He wasn’t ready to retire yet: he had plans to write his autobiography, signed a contract to do a weekly syndicated radio show that would air across the country, and would not count out a return to politics, perhaps a run for US Senator in 1950. But then he got sick: he had a tumor in his pancreas, and there was nothing that could be done about it. Fiorello La Guardia died peacefully at home in September 1947, aged 64. More than 40,000 people attended his funeral, as New Yorkers mourned the loss of one of the most colorful and impactful, figures in its long history.
